TUTORIAL: How to optimize your hair mesh
(You need experience with hairmeshing to understand what this does and understand the picture I provided.)

What will this do?
It's very annoying to recolor a hair that has alot of groups to recolor for each age. The worst I've seen is 17 groups per age, and the offender was... me.

This small tutorial will teach you as a hairmesher to:
- Have a bigger amount of mesh options. I mean alot bigger.
- Never have to suffer from transparency problems again
- Need only 3 or 2 groups per age for your texture file, to help recolor creators out, and yourself!
- Have a less bloated texture package

You need
- A texture file (the one that ends up in savedsims after import) wich has the parts: hairalpha5, hairalpha3, hair.
Get one at the bottom of this post. It's assigned to an older mesh of mine and has weird textures. Just replace textures, replace shape and cres like usual.
- A mesh package (has cres, shape, gmdc, gmnd)
- Every tool you normally use to mesh your hair

Knowledge you need to take notice of
- It would be handy if you know how to add groups/edit groups to meshes and textures. BlooM's quick way and HP's way

So here it is.
Let's say you are making a ponytail with some bangs, with alot of mesh parts, about 8. (There could be more if you can handle to keep a good overview, but too much will make the exporter complain about p-sections, I do not know the maximum amount.)




Flexibility
- Understand that one duplicate of all of these groups is not always ok. Sometimes the mesh is shaped in a way that doing that will give transparency problems anyway. What you do then is add more options.

Example:

hairpart 1 = alpha7, opacity 29
hairpart 2 = alpha7, opacity 27

hairpart 3 = alpha5, opacity 25
hairpart 4 = alpha5, opacity 23
hairpart 5 = alpha5, opacity 21

duplicate for alpha 7 parts: hairalpha3, opacity 2 (this is above/infront)
duplicate for alpha 5 parts: hairalpha1, opacity 1

The hairtexture will have.need:
hair, hairalpha7, hairalpha5, hairalpha3. hairalpha1

You can juggle with the numbers, but the rule is:
- that what you see first and is on top, needs the higher transparency
- the top hairparts can never have a lower opacity than the duplicates


Thanks to
- Lunar Eclipse and SimsArtistUnion, who's techniques I spied off. Muwahahha.
- Hysterical Paroxysm, who asked me to do this ages ago. Sorry.

Good luck!

Nouk, you have done so much to keep the Simworld well-coiffed! Thank you for this!

This is exactly what I was looking for for my upcoming Klingon hairs. You've saved me from pulling my own out - THANK YOU!! If we weren't both girls, I'd offer to have your children.

HI, im having trouble getting onto the website...Your website...it wont show up..i can go to other websites just not urs..it is telling me page error.

Nouk, you wrote a tutorial! Yay, thank you so much.